Time you enjoy wasting isn't wasted time.

You’ve all seen CAPTCHA in one form or another when creating an email or social networking account. The basic premise is that humans can still read non-uniform text better than a computer can.

Really smart people at Carnegie Mellon figured, “Hey, our book scanning and digitizing project isn’t working so well. There are still a bunch of words that our OCR just can’t handle. Let’s have humans fill the gap.”

The implementation of this idea is really one of those “Why didn’t I think of that?” moments. In CAPTCHA, you get one word you have to decipher. In CMU’s reCAPTCHA, you get two words with only one of them being the verification word. The other word helps to bring forth the destruction of libraries. j/k

So how many website login username/password combos do you maintain? Three? Five? 80? Sure, you can come up with a password algorithm or pneumonic to keep track of everything, or you can just be lazy and use the same password for everything.

How about if all you had to do to prove your identity was own a domain name?

Two websites I use regularly, Plaxo and FeedHub, have myOpenID login options. So far, everything is pretty smooth and straightforward. myOpenID even provides login history so I can see if anyone has attempted to use my id.

In order to provide you, my gentle readers, with the (mostly) quality content that MCOJ is synonymous with, I wade through torrents of RSS content. I’ve managed to cull some of the crap via Yahoo Pipes (e.g. nix anything w/Britney Spears, etc.), but most of the time you can’t really sum up your reading preferences via regular expressions.

You simply dump you OPML into FeedHub and it creates a single RSS firehose to drink from. Each article that you read is wrapped in a light interface that provides functionality equivalent to Tivo’s “Thumb’s Up” and “Thumb’s Down” buttons. As you keep training FeedHub, it gets smarter about what you want to read about.

I’m still in the training phase, so we’ll see how it turns out. Though I can see this being handy for sifting through high volume RSS feeds such as Google/Yahoo News and Gizmodo, I don’t see it applyng to friends’ blogs and web comics.